Thanksgiving 1975
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” –Charles Dickens
The demon Julia Child possessed my mother. She was planning a meal of such epic proportions it had a guest list, place cards, multiple courses of increasing difficulty and there were small tables arranged in our dining room.
photo by Jasmine Coro
I was eighteen, a freshman at Rutgers University where my father was a renowned and beloved English professor. Rutgers had recently started to accept women and I was guilted and bribed to apply and attend. Also, my math scores on the SAT were so low it’s possible I was given the sign-your-name credit and nothing more. I was not faced with a plethora of choices but when I said I wanted to go the the University of Wisconsin in Madison where my sister had found paradise and when I visited, we got stoned and ate freshly baked doughnuts at three o’clock in the morning, my mom said it would break my father’s heart. This heart had already been broken by his father’s disappearance, his year in a brutal orphanage and some lousy book sales but I could not bear adding to that heart’s damage. Also, as the daughter of a faculty member my tuition was free.
So I caved but negotiated an off-campus apartment, a car and a junior year in Ireland. But I was angry. New Brunswick was a slummy, dangerous town with a snuff movie playing at the only theatre for years. It was the place you drove through on your way home to Princeton. There was a campus behind the urban decay, but I felt martyred as only an overprivileged, angry eighteen-year-old could.
Another aspect was the lowering of the drinking age. In 1975 the drinking age was lowered to the age of the draft. Freshman orientation included copious amounts of beer and my memory of the night is hazy but suffice it to say I was hanging out with one guy and ended up with his cuter roommate. The seventies had the sexual revolution free of politics and content. Basically, it sort of sucked. No one I knew dated people. You slept together and then figured out whether it was just sex, or you actually liked the person.
I went to an open poetry reading for the free wine and noticed a tall, good-looking person who read his poetry with a sort of Dylanesque snarl. His poems were bad, but I told him they were great and also told him my name which meant he knew I was a professor’s daughter and where I lived which was off-campus. Despite my initial anger, the classes available to me as a fac brat were amazing. I was able to enroll in upper-level courses taught by incredible professors. After I wrote a few essays for the required comp course I was given a pass and moved into classes studying Moby Dick, Paradise Lost and a history course taught by a famous couple of historians, E.P. Thompson and his wife Dorothy. E.P. wrote The Making of the English Working Class. The first semester focused on the social history and was framed from a leftist perspective. It was a graduate course taught by Dorothy Thompson, but she let me in, and I earned an A. The second half focused on economics and theory which was way over my head.
The point was I had finally found a place where my combination of intellect and drama were both real and appreciated. I was constantly finding unsuitable boyfriends, and this parade of long-haired boys annoyed my father. Anyway, the tall, handsome, bad poet arrived at my door one night when I was already in my nightie with my hair in rag curls (I had a passion for curly hair), and we fell into bed. This became a pattern although we usually stayed at his house where after we had sex he either passed out or went out without me. I’d get out of bed and talk to his roommate who was very smart and kind and told me I could do much better. I was in love, sort of, and didn’t really need or want more, unlike my roommate, a self-described Jewish-American Princess who was supposed to marry a Jewish doctor but was deeply involved with an Italian American guy who delivered flowers. We always had wonderful flowers.
It was my first Thanksgiving since I started college and when I asked the bad poet, he readily accepted an invitation to my family dinner. I think it was a combination of his having nothing else to do and curiosity about the home life of a big deal professor. Also, my mother’s cooking had its fans among my father’s graduate students who had attended picnics at our house. We had passionate sex, but I wasn’t even sure if he liked me. Once I told him about a dream I had featuring a lovely man in white robes who brought me to his garden and the bad poet became enraged and said I was lying because that meant I’d dreamed about god. “We don’t believe in God,” I said. It was a family thing.
The dining room was full of small tables. We fetched my grandmother from the nursing home to give her the opportunity to say something mean about my mom’s cooking or how we looked or whatever. My grandmother Molly (yes, my name) was a nurse in WWI and absolutely killed it on the battlefield with a random Catholic priest she found so she could convert the poor boys she was trying to save. We had a basket of medals that were presumably presented to her by her dying patients.
I was seated at a small table with the bad poet, my dad, my Uncle Brendan, and my grandmother. Uncle Brendan, wonderful criminal that he was, had been recently told by his doctor to drink less, he drank all the time, so he started smoking pot which he kept in a Maxwell House coffee can. When he caught sight of the bad poet, he immediately handed him his rolling papers and the weed and said, “Get going.” The joint went around the table with me, my father and my grandmother who was monologuing about nuns, abstaining. It was awful. My grandmother insulted some part of the meal, and my mother had a fit and went upstairs. The bad poet and I drove my grandmother back to the nursing home.
“Your family is epic,” he said, eager to return to campus and tell everyone about his holiday. He didn’t want me to come so I stayed with my parents over the weekend and sulked.
By Christmas break, his lung suddenly collapsed, and I went totally into girlfriend mode and told my father I would be staying to take care of him over the holiday. But he didn’t want me there. He was already screwing a waitress who worked for Mario Batali in his first restaurant called Stuff Yer Face. I realized I was relieved as I headed back to Princeton and only felt sad about not getting to hang with his roommate again.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach